Mayor “kitty” Cull is so clever he is now going to… “For the benefit of Mr Kitty there will be a show tonight on trampoline in which…” Mr Kitty will herd and catch cats so they can be cat-egorized and clipped and electronically tagged. How clever a cat catcher is Mr Kitty!

Guyon having bested Cull de Mayor I suspect will have a great time continuing the interviews whilst Cull is titular head of the already disgraced body, the Local Goverment woofters.

Lawrence Yuill sunk them with various fiascos, mainly the water pollution sickening most of his constituency solely blamed on his council and now Cull exposed as the mudtanks denier will further sink them into the mire of irrelevance.

As well as car-hate, Dave Cull hates cats, it seems. Probably this was part of his enviro-Nazi, Sustainability-extremism. In addition it is likely to have been part of his LGNZ election campaign, with cats as a scapegoat to demonstrate his Greeny idealism. In the RNZ audio, Guyon Espiner points out some defects in Cull’s plans. The end result, from what Dave Cull said, will be that all cats that aren’t microchipped will be killed – if Dave and his teams can catch them. I think people like him realise that compliance with any such laws will be low – and consequently many family pets that are caught will be exterminated because many will not be microchipped.

It is not just the impracticality of enforcing things like curfews and registration, the whole purpose of this is flawed. Who says that every town and city is now automatically a wildlife sanctuary. And why should it be? 99% of our country isn’t cities and towns. Predatory cats are relatively few in the countryside, so those little birds should feel reasonably safe in that 99% of the country. Dave and the cat killers want this safe area to be 100% of NZ.

They say they are trying to save native birds, but not all native birds are under threat of extinction and so don’t need saving. Any sensible native bird wouldn’t live in a city anyway – my guess is that not many rare native birds live in cities.

For those few (if any) rare native birds that live in cities, cats are much more effective at catching rats and mice than birds. So, with cats mostly catching mice and rats, the removal of cats will increase the rat population and in many places this will be harmful to rare native bird populations. More rats are bad for other species as well – for example, humans. I agree with Guyon Espiner’s point that: this is not the business of City Councils.

He’s barking: “microchipping, de-sexing, and registering cats would reduce the risk to wildlife.”
How?
Cats are smart, they hear the refrigerator door being opened even when they are comatose on a sundrenched sofa. But they are limited, their understanding of microchips and registration is right up -down- there with Meeyower Cull’s. Ahead of it actually – they know instinctively without being able to put it into words, a microchip and registration hamper them not a jot or tiddles when it comes to leaping athletically after a bird. Any bird. They’re not prejudiced, they don’t go in for positive OR negative discrimination.

Even desexing, while important from humans’ p.o.v., is a yeah-nah to cats. Sex? While the gear’s there and working it’s a significant compulsion. When impossible it’s like Postman Pat – that belonged to a different time of their lives.

As usual with knuckledraggers’ clustersfucks, the unintended consequences have the potential to make the KD CFers’ as infamous as the geniuses who decided it would be nice to have rabbits in NZ, and gorse hedges.

There’s a wee bit of poverty going on in this country, strangely unnoticed by elected personages (homeless? problem? what-what?) so it’s not a good time to introduce another expense into households. Abandoning the kids is seldom the solution for families on the bones of their bums, but the suddenly unaffordable cat whose food was enough of a problem, and vet bills tended to involve slow paying off if the vet would allow, or a visit to the loan shark which is the equivalent of putting the whole family in a sack with some bricks and throwing them off a bridge……

So kitty becomes nobody’s. To give her a fair chance she’s taken out to the bush somewhere the cat-catcher isn’t likely to grab her and where she should be able to feed herself…….

We are going to have three years of Dave Cull being keenly questioned by the national mainstream press as spokesperson for Local Government NZ, instead of being treated with kid gloves by the Otago Daily Times. This ‘cat control’ interview is a good example of Mayor Cull’s characteristic communication style – trying to avoid saying anything definite and avoiding taking any responsibility for anything so he doesn’t get offside with anyone. Politics as a popularity contest. Guyon Espiner is not fooled by this slipperiness.

Our cat was seen out for breakfast this morning. Not chasing sparrows or thrushes. No. A two-hour happy meal in the city, with Asian guests. Much frivolity.
The smiley guests weren’t birdies affected by the Taieri floods, or rabbits with damaged homes or farms. Did the cat use the breakfast to raise donations for the flood appeal. Or, what flood.

No flood – sea level rise, what else could it be? I note Taieri farmers are still waiting for the tide to turn.
I wonder how many “Unintended Consequences” dams have been built, that are now preventing water getting away pending evaporation, or slowing down the innumerable small trickles that used to allow excess water to make a graceful exit to lower and lower levels till it came to a drain or a stream.

Such a lot of typing. And there’s so much of it around. I think it needs its own official abbreviation, UnConQ?

Birds. What is so special about protecting birds. Birds cost this nation millions of dollars in lost export earnings, through the damage they do to the horticulture industry, and to cropping farmers. Orchardists in Central Otago spend millions on protecting their crops from birds. Airports spend millions to prevent bird strike. Birds build nests in chimneys, around vehicle engines, that create fire hazards. Then there is bird flu that is endangering the health of the human population of the world. Cats are doing the human race a big favour in killing these feathered lice. Cats do the purr fixt job in Culling the birds. Long live the CATS.

http://www.unitec.ac.nz/advance/index.php/welfare-of-cats/
A view on cat management from a researcher on the issue. Cats are the only animals legally allowed to trespass. If trespassing cats come on to your property and cause nuisance or damage (smelly spraying, scratching up your garden or using it as a toilet, terrorizing your own cats, coming in your cat door), the owner is not liable for anything. Not only that, the property owner is responsible for the welfare of the trespassing cat because it is assumed to be someone else’s property and you are not allowed to damage other people’s property. So if you run over someone’s cat on your own driveway, you may have to compensate the owner which seems unfair. Trespassing cats may have been less of a problem when cities were less densely settled and cat ownership was not so high. But people live much closer together now, have smaller gardens and more cats.

Micro-chipping wasn’t available when the present laws about cats were made. This technology changes things because it makes it easy to distinguish between pets and unowned cats. So I think it’s reasonable that the law should now take this into account.

I think the ‘native wildlife protection’ argument for improved pet cat ownership management is rather weak because it mostly targets the wrong cats in the wrong areas. I think Mayor Cull’s insistence, as LGNZ spokesperson, that protecting native bird life is the only reason (and also a sufficient reason) for the wholesale ‘regulation’ of all cats confuses and trivializes the issue. So does his trying to compare cats with dogs. It’s a terrible argument to propose that, since dogs are ‘council controlled’, cats should also be because, if sound, it would be an argument for EVERYTHING being council-controlled. (So I agree with Auckland Mayor Goff’s caution.)

But the trespassing arguments makes sense to me. If trespassing cats are a nuisance on your property, there’s nothing you can do at the moment. The SPCA has a no-kill policy and gets no government funding so they won’t intervene. Nor presently will the council. You could hire a pest exterminator but that only works legally if the cat is unowned and how would you know? If the cat is a pet, then if you intervene you could be in legal trouble for interfering with (or stealing or destroying) someone else’s property.

City problems can be caused by colonies of unowned cats. Dunedin has had this problem in the central city, especially the student area, where the ‘flat cat’ turns up as a cute kitten and is fed and doted on but none of the flatmates really own it so it doesn’t get neutered and may get abandoned at the end of the year. And there’s plenty of food rubbish around to sustain these cats to breed for the next year. The tertiary sector has recently been addressing this problem quite responsibly.

The DCC’s LGNZ remit seems to assume that ‘cat control’ (about what exactly?) is a local government problem and the only possible solution is total regulation. But not necessarily. Councils may be the best agency to deal with unowned cats ONLY and that is not a matter of regulation but merely of identification. So the micro-chipping argument makes sense to me. Micro-chipping could remain voluntary but it could be the owner’s responsibility to make sure their cat is identifiable as a pet.

I think we might soon see law changes which remove the present right of pet cats to trespass, simply because it’s not fair to the owners of the property where the cats trespass. But there’s no reason why the involved parties can’t sort it out themselves, as people presently do with issues with trees on boundaries (maybe at the Disputes Tribunal).